the terrifying moroccan legend

Aisha Qandisha's biography

Aisha Qandisha's biography turned into a source of inspiration for a large number of artists and creators, including filmmakers, playwrights, novelists and plastic artists. Among them is the French plastic artist Anais Agmel, who exhibited her paintings in the Moroccan city of Agadir in 2015 under the title: Aisha Kandisha (a figure among Moroccans whose goal is to frighten people from her). The artist furnished her exhibition with paintings highlighting the features of Moroccan women according to her artistic perception, which led her to search in the history of popular Moroccan myths for a face whose features Moroccans are ignorant of, but who hear a lot about him.

The Souk Art Troupe presented the play "Who Is Aisha?" (Who is Aisha?) who narrated her biography based on imagination in modern ways based on the youth teamwork that gave the play a special character through paintings of dancing and singing.

Aisha also discussed the biography of a number of creators, such as Abdel Majid Benjelloun (1981-1919) in his short story collection "Valley of Blood", which talks about Moroccan resistance to French colonialism. Attention to enter the popular memory and turn into a tale circulated by generations.

As for the Moroccan novelist, Mustafa Al-Ghetiri, he published a novel about “Dar Al-Nayat” in Syria in 2008 entitled “Aisha the Saint,” in which he focuses on the transformation of this character from a historical woman of resistance to a “fairy” that lurks in humans, and then into a legend inherited by generations of Moroccans. Mustafa Al-Ghatiri told Al-Mayadeen Net: "My employment of the legend of Aisha Qandisha in the novel "Aisha the Saint" was governed by several dimensions, including:

The first dimension: artistic and aesthetic, so that the strangeness of the story and its metaphysical depth undoubtedly contribute to arousing the reader’s attention and thus his demand for the text. Because what interests me mainly in the novel is to create an artistic tale that will impress the reader.

The second dimension: enlightenment, which is to draw attention to the mentality of the Moroccan and Arab person in general, which suffers from a kind of schizophrenia. Rational accumulations, which until recently claimed to be armed with. It is a powerful paradox that deserves to be addressed in order to understand it, and Aisha the Saint is a small contribution in this direction.

The third dimension: purifying, I mean a kind of catharsis in the Aristotelian concept, that is, liberating people and purifying them from the domination of this fairy over their minds. In the popular imagination, perhaps it contributes to freedom from fear.”